Do I need a managed search platform or can I self-host?

You can do either — it depends on your priorities.

Self-host if you want:

• Lower recurring cost at scale you can manage
• Full control over data, tuning, plugins, and infrastructure
• Compliance / data residency requirements
• Customization that managed platforms may not support

Good fit when:

• You have an ops team comfortable with search clusters
• Your workload is predictable
• You can tolerate some maintenance burden

Tradeoffs:

• You’re responsible for upgrades, scaling, backups, monitoring, incident response
• Search systems can be tricky to tune
• Relevance, sharding, and indexing issues can take time to solve

Managed search platform if you want:

• Faster setup
• Less operational overhead
• Automatic scaling / monitoring / backups
• Easier path to production without a specialist team

Good fit when:

• You want to move quickly
• Search is important but not your core differentiator
• You don’t want to run infrastructure

Tradeoffs:

• Usually more expensive
• Less control over internals
• Potential vendor lock-in
• Limits on custom plugins/configuration

Simple rule of thumb

• Small team / need speed / limited ops → managed
• Strong infra team / strict control / cost optimization at scale → self-host

If you tell me these 4 things, I can recommend one:

1. Approximate data size and query volume
2. Team size / ops experience
3. Compliance or data residency needs
4. Whether search is core to your product or just a feature